Drupal 8 has a built-in REST API that allows programmatical access to all the entities on a site. Similar functionality has been implemented for Drupal 7, in the RESTful Web Services (restws) module.
In project I’m working on, in preparation for upgrading a site to Drupal 8, we were looking into options for creating “D8 ready APIs for a D7 site”. The idea is to implement any new integrations (and to re-implement old ones) so that when we upgrade our Drupal from 7 to 8, the integrated systems won’t even notice it. I checked out the restws module as a potential option for that.
It turns out that the APIs are not identical: The URLs are different (“/node/” vs. “/entity/node/”) and the structure for the data that needs to be sent is different as well ({"type":"page","title":"test title"} vs. {"_links":{"type":{"href":"http://drupal-8.localhost/rest/type/node/page"}}, "title":[{"value":"test title"}]}). As such, restws isn’t going to work for us.
But, since I went through the trouble of adapting aalamaki’s test code to do some testing of my own, I decided to post the code here, as I couldn’t find a good example of creating nodes by doing POST requests against the restws API:
<?php
// Example code: Creating Drupal 7 nodes by POSTing from cURL in PHP:
$site = "127.0.0.1/d7";
$user = "someusername";
$pass = "theusersassword";
$crl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'PHP script');
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "/tmp/cookie.txt");
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, '/tmp/cookie.txt');
// Login
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_URL,"http://" . $site . "/user/login");
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "name=" . $user . "&pass=" . $pass . "&form_id=user_login");
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_COOKIE, session_name() . '=' . session_id());
$ret = new stdClass;
$ret->response = curl_exec($crl);
$ret->error = curl_error($crl);
$ret->info = curl_getinfo($crl);
// Get RESTWS token.
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://' . $site . '/restws/session/token');
$ret = new stdClass;
$ret->response = curl_exec($crl);
$ret->error = curl_error($crl);
$ret->info = curl_getinfo($crl);
$token = $ret->response;
// Do the API call to create the node. Places tagged with "UPDATING" relate to updating existing nodes instead of creating new ones.
date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Helsinki");
$data = json_encode(array(
'type' => 'article', // UPDATING: Don't try to set the "type" for existing nodes.
'title' => 'It is a new article, created by ' . $user . ' at ' . date('c'),
));
// UPDATING: Use PUT instead of POST when updating a node
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
//curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE);
//curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "PUT");
// UPDATING: Add the node id when updating a node
//curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://' . $site . '/node/1');
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://' . $site . '/node');
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, FALSE);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($crl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/json', 'X-CSRF-Token: ' . $token));
$ret = new stdClass;
$ret->response = curl_exec($crl);
$ret->error = curl_error($crl);
$ret->info = curl_getinfo($crl);
//var_dump($ret);
curl_close ($crl);
unset($crl);
